Quotes About Essence

Melody is the essence of music. I compare a good melodist to a fine racer, and counterpointists to hack post-horses; therefore be advised, let well alone and remember the old Italian proverb: Chi sa più, meno sa—Who knows most, knows least.

God cares less about what we do than what we are. In the eternal scheme of things, God looks at our hearts, not our résumés.

Each man's soul is his genius.

Human nature is what Heaven supplies.

Human nature refers to what is in people but which they cannot study or work at achieving.

That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?

Ce n'était pas une vie; on existait, et c'est tout.

The way the function dictates the form... elegant lines... nothing extraneous... this shoe perfectly expresses the essence of shoeness.

Buddha was once asked to describe the essence of his teachings," Rinpoche said. "Do you know what he replied? 'Abandon harmfulness. Cultivate goodness. Subdue your mind.

Inner qualities, not outer appearances.

What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it.

The natural world is the only reality, thus the only valid base for spirituality there is.

He wrapped his arms around her, and they stood that way for a long time. Then Kira felt his body soften, shift, change. His flesh dissolved around her into lambent light. She raised her arms over her head and spread them wide as the essence of his being curled around her in a warm, soothing display of love that she had ever only experienced with Odo. For

After all, he had spent his life studying and quantifying natural phenomena. If there was one lesson to be learned from that, it was that there is no fixed rule in nature that applies in like manner to everything. Variation is the very essence of nature.

Let a man go to the bottom of what he is and believe in that.

want to cut to the absolute bone.

Boiled down to its core, the truth is always a simple, solid thing

The highest things are always the first to go. The basic things, the animal things, are preserved the longest. The high always falls. The low can't fall.

inside of a man lies a heart, but in a heart does not lie a man.

It doesn't matter what we choose. It simply matters what we are.

What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.

To see the full miraculous essentiality of the color blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks. To see fully, the beauty of a daughter's face is to be fully grateful without having to seek a God to thank him.

Life can find you only if you are paying real attention to something other than you own concerns, if you can hear and see the essence of otherness in the world, if you can treat the world as if it is not just a backdrop to your own journey, if you can have a relationship with the world that isn't based on triumphing over it or complaining about it.

We find that, all along, we had what we needed from the beginning and that in the end we have returned to its essence, an essence we could not understand until we had experienced the actual heartbreak of the journey.